Gravel in the Bag

At one point this week's GNN threatened to people no less than seven, but Andrew was lost to fatigue and Ian's mysterious friend Paul remained, for now at least, mysterious. Instead we began as a four: our host Joe, Martin, Matt, and myself (Sam). As we pondered over whether a fifth person would arrive shortly, we played Gold Fever: possibly one of the silliest games to somersault through the GNN door: each player has a bag of five gold pieces, and the first to draw four of them wins the game. But - you also have twelve gravel pieces (four each of white, grey and black) and if you draw two of the same type of gravel, you're bust, and must chuck everything back in your bag.

What adds a soupçon of strategy is the option to stick: instead of continuing to draw, keep any gold you drew and chuck your gravel in someone else's bag instead. It's not the sort of game where you can pause and take photos, as if anyone draws a ruby, it becomes a simultaneous race to pull out a gold piece. The result is a very swingy, silly, Take-That affair, which I now can't remember who won. Not me though. And not Martin either, who declared the game "stupid" - but in a fairly complimentary way.

With Mysterious Paul's absence now established, we realised we had an hour as a four to play with. And so we set up Oregon.

The board is a grid of sorts where you can play a combo of landscape cards to add a cowperson (or a 'guy' as we referred to them) to a square, or you can play a single landscape card and a building card to add a building. Both score when placed: guys score any building they're adjacent to, buildings trigger adjacent guys. I think. I found the very simple mechanic weirdly hard to get my head around, despite playing the game before. Matt surged off into an early lead as Joe struggled to get going. Martin gathered his guys together in a huddle (points!) and made sure he was adjacent to a lot of mines. I kept pace for a bit but started to lag when my hand was full of bird cards.

It got crowded.

It also got extremely thinky, and we were all mid-pause when Ian arrived and had to be patient as we lurched towards the end. It's not the sort of game you'll get a kick out of watching as it's mostly like wandering around a library and hearing someone murmur 'shit' under their breath every now and then.

Joe's late-game performance was such that he actually surged into the lead at one point, but come the final count-up, Martin's collection of coal and gold saw him crowned most convincing cowperson:

Martin 93
Sam 80
Joe 75
Matt 65

Matt realised his lack of coal and gold counted against him. Martin confessed to cockblocking Joe. The game met with lots of approving murmurs, if not the outright excitement of our next conquest: Decrypto. Martin and I teamed up again to see if our losing run would continue, whilst Ian joined with Joe and Matt. We - Martin and I - felt pretty confident early on, when we'd deciphered two of the other team's words pretty quickly. But our confidence evaporated when they successfully intercepted us. We intercepted right back, but then - disaster! - Martin's clue of 'end' for Bell was identified by Joe, and we'd need to intercept again successfully to even have the chance of a draw. It came down to the single word of 'Horn' which could go with word 4, which we'd already identified as Boat. But was it a bluff, designed to make us guess 4? We'd wagered it was a bluff, and put our money on the enigmatic second word - and we were right!

So it came down to the decider - which team could identify the most words? Thanks to Matt's horn  Martin realised that the second word (magical/horn) could be unicorn, and he was right. In the narrowest of wins, we identified all four words to their three:

Martin and Sam - win! (finally)
Ian, Joe, Matt - don't win

The hour was still early, and we had no less than four more games in us. First up was High Society, which I said might be my favourite Knizia. This got the room rustling like a Jose Mourinho press conference, what with the likes of Ra and Tigris and Euphrates out there. But I love the simplicity and silliness of High Society, where every card flip can be a mini-drama.

And this proved to be a particularly dramatic night: I began the spending with a x2 card the first to flip, but before too long there were three x2 cards on the table and Joe in particular seemed to have spent a lot of money. Martin was convinced he (- Joe) was nailed on for last place (so was I), but there was to be a twist in the tail. Joe made us all spend cash to pick up the -5 card, and Ian spent big on the 2. Then the fourth red flipped over and the game instantly ended. Contrary to expectations, Matt had somehow spent the most and was bust. Martin and I had 2x zero, and the convincing winner was Joe!

Joe 12
Ian 6
Martin/Sam 0
Matt - BUST!

Martin still reckoned Joe should have lost, despite the evidence. Another GNN story to tell our grandchildren.

Next up was Perudo, as canvassed for by Ian and seconded by me. It was the usual Perudo story of deception and brutality, as we hedge-betted and lied our way around the table. Matt was first out after he went into a semi-death-spiral and lost dice on subsequent turns. Ian followed him shortly afterwards. With three of us and Martin palafico, he bet on three fives. I had none, and he was out. Joe and I faced off with Joe palafico and me with three. He paused for so long I started convincing myself he was reading my mind, but fortunately whatever he discovered there was as unreliable as I've ever found it:

1 Sam
2 Joe
3 Martin
4 Ian
5 Matt

We then busted out another game of Gold Fever, notable mostly for Joe passing gravel to Martin when both Matt and Ian had gold in front of them. "I've got no fucking gold!" he protested.
"But you're Martin" said Joe.
Martin promised bitter revenge but we all got sidetracked by trying to shaft Ian first, whose bag was filling up with everyone else's gravel. I think Joe won, but oddly I can't remember. Games of Gold Fever are a bit like an Intercity 125 zipping through a station of steam trains.

Last game of the night, then, with Joe setting up Botswana AKA Wildlife Safari AKA They Must Have Had Loads of Plastic Animals They Didn't Know What To Do With (Martin).

This is another neat Knizia where you play an animal card, and take an animal (a plastic animal). You can take any animal you like, but you must take one. The cards have values between 0 and 6, though, and when the sixth card is played on any row, the game ends and the last card played in each row defines the value of your animals.

My lions were looking pretty valuable too, until Martin played the zero on them. But fortune smiled on Joe as the game ended before he had to play his last card on the zebras: the zero. Joe had a lot of zebras:

Joe 23
Martin 16
Ian 11
Sam 10
Matt 5

And that was that! A lot of foul-mouthed fun was had in an evening of short games. "They're all short games!" Martin said when I mentioned as much. We'd forgotten about Oregon.